Very interesting article about Wikis. It's a good summery of the history of wikis and is also showing the future, namely becoming more "mainstream" by being the new weblogs and also becoming of interest for companis, which are selling wiki based products.
excerpts from the article:
The biggest and most widely known wiki right now is Wikipedia, a public collaborative encyclopedia with more than 1.2 million articles in 160 languages. Its 400,000 English-language articles make it handily more than three times as big as its next largest competitor, Encyclopaedia Britannica. And who's the author? Could be anyone. Currently the site has about 10,000 regular contributors, and within, say, 30 seconds, you could be one, too.
Will Wikis ever hit the mainstream of Web usage? Blogs, once considered for "geeks only," are now being created by corporations, major media outlets and universities. In many ways, these collaborative sites offer a better way to share knowledge than the Internet has yet had. Wikis go a step further in democratizing the Web, making it possible for all of the fragments that individuals would normally contribute through personal Web pages and blog entries to combine as continuous living documents rather than stagnating as dead ends.
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